Ridley

X-Trail Force 1 Complete Bike - 2016

As gravel and all-surface adventure cycling matures into a proper discipline, we're starting to see more and more frame geometries and tire clearances that match Ridley's X-Trail Force 1 Complete Bike. That's because traditional crit and 'cross rockets are compact, twitchy machines designed to react before you even realized you're correcting them. That's great for Euro 'cross courses and the 90-degree corners of downtown criteriums in the Mid-West, but it doesn't do much good in applications that don't involve spending a painful hour in the red mist of zone four. The X-Trail is about long days and longer weekends exploring the intersection of tarmac, gravel, dirt roads, and even washboard single track. Ridley's X series has long been about 'cross racing, but the X-Trail pushes the line into a whole new world of virtually limitless cycling.

Before we go any further, it's important to stress that the X-Trail isn't a dumpy noodler. Ridley shapes the X-Trail C30's frame using ultralight unidirectional carbon, equipping the frame to offer quick accelerations and a stiff, responsive ride for everything from pannier-laden weekend trips to off-road grinduro segments. Subtly asymmetrical, the Oryx Disc fork was carefully reinforced on the left leg to allow it to more efficiently bear twisting forces applied by disc brakes, and with a 15 x 100mm thru axle in front and a 12 x 142mm in the rear, the frame achieves confidence-inspiring stiffness throughout.

As mentioned above, the X-Trail is a melting pot of frame geometries. The end result resembles a road bike more than a classic cyclocross bike like the X-Night, with a lower bottom bracket, shorter chainstays, and a stack/reach combination that leaves riders in less of a shoulder-intensive, slammed racing position. In contrast to its road racing frames, Ridley extended the X-Trail C30's head tube by 10mm, bringing riders into a more upright position to accommodate longer training rides rather than racing exclusively. It's only slightly more aggressive than the Fenix, in fact, but unlike its endurance road cousin, the X-Trail is designed to be run with tires up to 40mm wide on more rugged terrain.

And finally, the frosting on this gravel-ground cake: SRAM's latest Force 1 HRD groupset. The simplicity of a one-by drivetrain is ideal for the kind of abusive adventure cycling that the X-Trail's stability and tire clearance recommend it for, and the added stopping confidence of hydraulic disc brakes comes especially in handy when navigating dusty back roads with the added weight of fully loaded panniers.